AdSense for Video out of pilot mode and into beta

By Jenstar on February 21, 2008, 11:50 am

Posting a lot of videos to YouTube and stream at least a million views a month? Oh, and of course, are living in the US? You can know sign up for the AdSense for Video beta. It has been in pilot test mode for a select few advertisers… so select in fact, I don’t think I have ever seen one in my random daily web travels (don’t confuse AdSense for Video with the AdSense video ads, where some ad units display video ads instead of a regular text or image ad unit).

These new ads are actually text ad overlays that appear on the bottom part of a YouTube streamed video. The bottom 20% of the video will show ads. During the video with text overlay ads, up to ten ads will appear in the bottom, where they will cycle through with 20 seconds on-screen time each. Users can choose to turn off the ads while viewing the video, so you aren’t “stuck” seeing ads if you don’t want to. Clicking an ad will open it up in a new browser window or tab. And after the video plays, three relevant ads will appear in the video window.

Want to see it in action? BobVila.com has been running them as part of the pilot on this video (sorry, you will have to click through an interstitial ad to get to the video). This is what it looks like on the screen (click the image to see the full size version):

There are not specifics on how much publishers can earn with AdSense for Video, although there are two models being used depending on the circumstances.

One problem I saw is that some of the InVideo overlay ads ended up having logos and/or text covered up by the “Ads by Google” which is clearly the top layer in the video. So they might need to add some documentation for advertisers to avoid this problem (I saw it on the Real-life Simpsons video with the Bee Movie ad).

InVideo ads are paid on a CPM basis, since the ads are animated and “play” at the same time as the video. The text ads run on a CPC basis so advertisers only pay if the ad is clicked. Obviously, it will be much more profitable for publishers to run the CPM ads, since I just can’t see a high CTR rate on the text overlay ads.

The program is only available to US publishers now (although we are teased that they will open it to more publishers of smaller sizes in other countries). And there is a minimum of one million video streams per month.

Right now it is only for YouTube videos, meaning you need to upload your videos to YouTube in order to profit from them via AdSense.

They also still have their YouTube Partner Program which allows video creators (instead of those just streaming other people’s videos) to earn money when their videos are viewed. That landing page does remind me of an affiliate spam page, rather than a page for a Google property publisher program.

Are you an advertiser wanting to advertise in videos? Right now it is only available to those advertisers who have managed accounts (ie. have an account rep). But you can request to be contacted when it opens to regular advertisers, if you do not have a rep. There are also case studies from an advertiser perspective.

As for advertisers, you ads are already showing on YouTube videos if you are using the content network. So you don’t need to opt-in to appear. If you prefer to opt-out of the text overlay ads, you can contact your account rep or send an email to AdWords support. You can choose to have your ads removed from all video, or just the ones that individual users are embedding on their own sites. You can find more here.